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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brown Jenkin" data-source="post: 319517" data-attributes="member: 2572">I could ask the same of you. Maybe I am phrasing things badly but once more I feel as if my question is left unanswered. One last time I will resond to this same reply.Yes absolutely WotC can do what it wants with its property. If they want to give away the material for free to anyone who asks, great, but even in this case they still control its distribution and use. My point is they are encouraging or allowing with full knowlege anyone to copy and distribute material that they own and are not releasing themselves. If WotC provided this information themselves there would be no arguement, the IP belongs to them period. By not doing it themselves they are either encouraging acts of piracy by thier position, since no-one who is doing this owns the rights to this material they are distributing, or they are saying that it is ok to freely distribute this material. If it is the later then the IP is no longer under thier control and therfore is now public domain since anyone can access and distribute it. Yes absolutely. I don't disagree at all. I fully agree that users can enter anything they want to legaly. My point is not the entering but the redistribution of copyright materials. As an analogy that has been used elsewhere. I can make mp3s or cassettes of any CD I own legally. I can not then freely distribute it however. While I am on the example the point I am making is that WotC has said Feel free to redistribute the songs on mp3 but not on cassette. Are these songs now public domain? Once they say go ahead and redistribute are they allowed to control the medium of redistribution?There would still be a debate as the point is still valid. If I write a book about my life, can I allow it to be copied and redistributed by any third party in only word format, or by allowing it to be freely copied and redistributed in one format am I giving up my rights to it.Whether or not WotC owns the file format or not does not mater. Does microsoft have any claim to the way thier word format is used? Yes WotC will make money if thier product is supported by the fans. According to the OGL/d20 licence which assuming PCGen is in complience with (which should be soon) WotC can not stop PCGen from having a product that is equal to the actual release of e-tools 1.0. WotC is trying to give a competitive advantage to e-tools however by making it so e-tools has more information than PCgen. This is fine and great if it being done legally. The way to do this is to officialy release the extra information. If they did this, then great. I will gladly fork over extra money myself. What I see them doing however is either encouraging piracy to get that advantage or making the info public then attempting to prevent its use by PCGen, both of which I see as illegal.Once more here at the end I will restate the question. Is it legal for a company to allow the free redistribution of its IP by anyone and still maintain FULL rights to it?</blockquote>

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